Dora Maar at Tate Modern

Because my packet of museum cards and memberships dropped out of my bag last week, I'm going round to various places to get replacement cards. Today, to Tate Modern.

Once there, new card in hand, what to go see, to make the journey worthwhile? If you're feeling a bit listless, the Dora Maar exhibition (to 15 March)is perhaps not the best choice. Or I just wasn't in the mood for lots of monochrome photographs, and did not find much that grabbed me, even among her later paintings.

She worked as a photographer in the 1930s (she was born in 1907) and the early photos - some very small - were displayed to advantage in large frames behind thick, well-cut mounts. 

Making much from little

Large-format negatives were interesting, or was it just that they introduced some colour?

Dora Maar's hands

A dress masquerading as a tattoo, c1935

The shadows of nudes are what I'll remember from the exhibition, perhaps because I've just been looking at the "ladies and vases" by Charlotte Hodes -

And of the model, Assia Granatouroff -

 A "fashion and beauty" photocollage for magazine illustration - rather sinister, perhaps because of the turbulent white impasto painted background, revealed (accidentally?) in the hand -

We know Dora Maar mostly through her relationship with Picasso and his "Weeping Woman" painting, and the exhibition includes a little book of little photographs of him, put into little pockets. The album has an interesting structure, and is perspexed to the nines -

There's a fair bit of surrealism - and the main Surrealism room has been painted an almost irridescent shade of pink. I hurried through that one.

Camera shenanigans

"Disrupted geometry" - obviously a lot of people won't find this at all interesting! -

 I'm trying hard to resist taking photos of marks on the ground, but sometimes......

 A screenshot of a funny thing the camera decided to do with a panoramic shot -

Military parade, Horse Guards (accidental encounter)

 And a couple of pix the camera decided to take when my attention was elsewhere ...

Yet another storage crisis

Although I'm not too bothered by the pile-up in the studio, when it comes to lack of space on my phone, I'm overwhelmed.

An avalanche of photos waits to be deleted to "free up space on device". 

(via)

And until there is space - ie, some memory is free - it's not possible to take photos with the phone. Disaster! Crisis! Panic!

First step - research. There is a lot of clear and helpful info online on "quick ways to clear space", for instance this, from which we learn that

Oreo [on Android] includes a new toggle called Smart Storage that can work wonders without needing to do a thing. Flip it on, and your phone will automatically clear out the biggest space-stealing culprit: photos and videos.

No no no, screams my Inner Hoarder, fearing an irreperable loss. Scroll past the photo of the screen in that article and calm down...........

Since we all forget to clear out our photo libraries regularly, you can choose to automatically remove backed-up photos and videos after 30, 60, or 90 days, making sure your phone isn’t stuffed with duplicate photos. 

Good plan (the photos are automatically backed up to googlepix on the computer) - but my phone may be too old for this. It seems to be an all-or-nothing model when it comes to removing items. So it's back to Plan B....

On Fridays, on the computer, I put the week's most important pix (the grandbaby, and a limited number of "creative" categories) into albums and then send them to the Archive [deleting them outright would wipe them out], which means that on the phone they can be found in Albums. The next step is to archive the lot but first I need to (a) decide on a few other "important" categories and make Albums and (b) go through the backlog... it would also help to (c) get into the habit of taking fewer photos!

This article on freeing space on Android phones gives more info on Google Photos -

which provides unlimited backup of high-quality photos and videos – up to
16 megapixels for photos and full-HD for videos – to your Google account.
You can also back up in the original resolution, but that will count as part of your
storage limit (15GB for most users*). 

If you’ve automatic backup in Google Photos turned on, pull up the menu from within
the app, and choose Free up space. This will remove all backed-up photos and videos
from your device, and they’ll be downloaded from the Internet when you go to view them next time.

*"Google gives 15 gigs of free cloud storage with every account, so you might as well use it. Anything inside your Downloads or Files app can be jettisoned to your Google Drive by tapping the menu button in the top right corner and choosing “Send to...” This will open the share sheet, where you can select select Save to Drive to choose which folder to add it to. Then you can delete it from your phone without losing it forever." (via)

"Why don't you just get a SIM card?" Oh if only it was that easy - my phone, the OnePlus, has no slot for a SIM card. Grrr. Otherwise the phone works fine (when there's memory space) - and I don't want to add yet another "old" but otherwise satisfactory electronic device to the mountains of wasted resources.

1.5 billion smartphones were sold in 2017; what happened
to the phones they replaced?     (via)

It's a useful personal challenge to learn how to use this phone efficiently and to keep it going. It ain't broke, so why try to fix it? The problem is with the user interface! Fixing that takes "only" time, thought, learning, and the willingness to change old habits.

Some progress has been made, and since then, many photos have been put in albums and archived on the computer, and entire weeks of 2017 have been deleted from the phone. We're not there yet, but I'm hopeful....

Of course I've set out to "get really on top of this" many times before, but it's like quitting smoking - each time you try, you get a little closer to eventual success.

Photographing the sun's journey

One of my favourite parts of The Sun exhibition at the Science Museum (till 6 May) was the Solargraphy project, designed and coordinated by Tarya Trygg, photography lecturer in Finland. The project is part of her PhD work.

Participants set up a pinhole camera and left it in place for a year. The exposed film shows the tracks the sun made across the sky -

Latitude matters! In the top row, the one on the left is taken in Alaska, and beside it is a solargraph from Quito, Ecuador -

 The one of Stonehenge is rather miraculous -

Woodn't you know...

What was meant to be the floor of the living room - but when it arrived, we didn't like it, toooo many knots - is being put on ebay, at last. I'd happily give it away, all 20 square metres of Canadian maple - it's been blocking access to my books for a couple of years now, but it does give me an excuse (if one were needed) to procrastinate doing anything major about the studio.

I was told by my Resale Mastermind to take 12 photos and send them to him, and he'd do the rest. This"little" task involved turfing half the contents of the studio out into the hall, to make room for a "clear" shot. Grr. And then ... how to get twelve different photos??

The camera may have sensed my desperation because it took a few photos all by itself ....

Flashback 2002

In 2002 I tackled the many printed photos of "my work". I'd been in the habit, on getting a processed film back, of writing the date on the back - F92 for February 1992, for instance. The photos got sorted, sooner or later, into categories like travel, friends, museum objects, and my own creations. They were filed in shoeboxes - six of them, holding about a thousand prints each (sounds like a lot, and is a lot!). 

Since starting creative classes in the early 90s I'd been photographing promiscuously, sending off three or four films to be processed every month. So it took a while to go through them, and I didn't go through them all before running out of steam. 

For several weeks I pulled a random photo from the "my work" section of the shoebox, glued it onto a sheet of paper, and wrote down my thoughts about it. Each paper went into a binder, which was eventually organised into sections. By then it was almost bursting -

 Some random pages... I didn't read what I'd written; the joy was in the making. I was trying, at the time, to "find a way forward" and yet not bar myself from other things that looked fun and needed to be engaged with or at least tried.

Dense embroidery on a heart theme, and some larger works that haven't been filed yet

Leaves sewn from squares of metallic organza...

... and the "windblown" sculpture and "Seasons" quilts

In progress: a wall quilt that started as drawings of objects in the V&A,
photocopied and painted with transfer paints, then ironed onto fabric,
which was cut up and interspersed with strips of  silks

In the 1990s and 2000s I went to a lot of classes in a variety of media, usually at City Lit, and mostly loved textiles, sewing, quilting, embroidery. I spent a lot of time dreaming up and starting new projects, but had no real focus. Even in the art foundation course that I attended on retirement, and in the subsequent MA, it was the excitement of the latest bright idea that carried me along. At least I was getting better at bringing the projects to some sort of conclusion!

It's rather a relief to find my making is now limited to just a few things - the fabric pots that become ceramics; drawing; the occasional bookart session; the relaxation of knitting along with a podcast or video. Sewing, quilting, embroidery are having a rest, while reading is getting more of a look-in. In the back of my mind, "one day", a bit of wood-turning ....

Camera tricks (android phone)

My phone camera produces unsatisfactory photos under certain lighting conditions - we get all sorts of lighting at the Drawing Tuesday show&tell sessions, and sometimes the photos are rather poor.

I've not been able to - no, that's not right, let me rephrase it: I've not looked for how to change the camera settings - they're not under the phone settings, so where could they be? A bit of web searching reveals that these things are hidden in plain sight! To find them, via such instructions, you do have to know the terminology. And the basic moves - swipe left, open from the app. And what the icons are called.

(There is a theory that not knowing the terminology is what stops many people (usually those of a certain age) from using "smart" technology. A publication along the lines of "what does it look like - what's it called - what does it do" that covers various devices could be useful.)

I discovered that the menu for the camera appears when you open the camera from the cluttered screenful of icons for apps, ie not by drawing a V on screen or double tapping (which I didn't know was possible!) and then you swipe from the left.

On this list is Manual, which I'd simply disregarded, but now had to investigate. Oh! There's a brightness setting, a sort of wheel that you can touch to move to adjust the colour cast - cloudy, daylight, auto, fluorescent, or incandescent - and what a difference that makes!

In daylight, indoors (bright white matte and gloss paint) -

Cloudy conditions

Under sunny skies

Auto (with bonus focal point!)

Fluorescent lighting

Incandescent lighting

The  little round lamp is an LED light, shining on a white wall -

Set to cloudy

sunshine/daylight

auto

fluorescent

incandescent

Another possibility for getting a brighter photo is playing with the ISO setting. A higher setting indicates a faster "film", ie shorter shutter speed needed, so to get more light into the camera, use a smaller ISO number, maybe 200 or 100. If lighting is confusing, eg spotlights indoors, the camera doesn't know what to do.

All very interesting, but the proof will be in the pudding when, next time we meet round a table in a spotlit corner of a cafe, the Drawing Tuesday photos are taken.

Did you notice the "focal point" - the double circle? This appears when you touch the "camera" screen, and using it is a good idea in tricky lighting conditions. Sometimes the camera takes a little moment to adjust and focus, and premature clicking results in blurry photos. This is like the "hold the button halfway down before clicking all the way" on a proper camera - it's giving the machine time to do its very best.

Of course some editing can be done in camera or on computer, and often the "auto colour correct" function works fine ... but not always. I use googlephotos because they are automatically downloaded from the phone onto my laptop, and that program offers rotation, colour correction (tricky if the colour balance is bad to start with!), cropping... There's a keystroke for downloading, eg to Photoshop, where you can do more complicated things there, but laziness usually wins.  The laziest thing of all is to take a good photo in the first place!

Kids' eye view

Last week I noticed that photos had appeared along the street, taken by 5-year-olds from the local school. Either I didn't look hard enough, or some new ones have appeared ....

"I thought they were bunny rabbits but they weren't"

"Green bananas"

"That was fake because it was closed"

An insight into children's minds, should the busy-busy passer-by care to notice. And coincidentally, someone on the radio who has researched the focusing vs noticing powers of 5 year olds finds they notice things outside of the task at hand more than adults do, ie they are more distractible [surprise!] -- so he suggests that classrooms shouldn't have interesting things on the walls, so that the children will be able to receive their "education" from what the teacher tells them t focus on. What joy!

Looking back on the week

This week has centred around my desk and the final stages of newsletter production, but even so I seem to have taken quite a few photos. They remind me of where I've been - and I've been to some interesting (to me - I seem to find too much interesting!) places. Of course the need to take 10,000 steps a day is a big motivator for getting out (today at noon there are still 9,700 steps to go, quite daunting....)

Sunday, walking to Tom and Gemma's via Wood Green. These jolly little houses -

are mere steps from an inhuman conglomeration of office buildings

 which does have a remnant of surprise.

Monday, to Kew Gardens for a "tree walk" - an hour of learning about some of the trees from a volunteer guide. I had to be quick with the camera, we went at quite a pace! These strange fruits are osage oranges -

(It seems I didn't write about these when first encountered, some years ago - but looking back through all the posts on my blog with "kew" in them took quite a while, and provided quite a few surprises. It's amazing what you forget...)

The story of the large cork tree, amid the living ones in Kew's Mediterranean garden, is that Kew got a phonecall - "we're about to fell our cork tree, would you like it?" ...

Later, wandering around, I took some photos of the outside of the water lily house, in homage to Tony -

 He took many photos of this wonderful glass house as well, and despite his dislike of heights would climb to the aerial walkway -

 Tuesday - impromptu purchase of a snuggly coat - this displaces two others from my closet -

 Wednesday - a bit more progress on T&G's garden -

 and the discovery of caterpillars in my own -

 Thursday - discoveries in Crouch End, at the Picturehouse

 and in a charity shop window -

An Orla Keily colouring book? It's all gone too far....

Friday - rain at lunchtime, exactly as forecast. I spent more time at the South Bank than anticipated, waiting for it to stop, which it didn't seem to want to -

...which gave me a chance to look around the Royal Festival Hall. I used to go there very often, but it's been a couple of years since my last visit. Or longer. Projections and amplified music (piano at this point) were happening in the ballroom space -

That sent me out to brave the weather, heading for the Woman's Hour Craft Prize at the V&A (till 5 February). The darned jumpers are by Celia Pym - "very conceptual", or are they ... it's about valuing objects and their personal connections in an age of bland consumerism, imho. The stories of the garments and their owners are given beside the photos -

 And this laboriously made clay bouquet, by Phoebe Cummings, is a fountain - the clay is unfired; guess what will happen...

 Another temporary exhibition at the V&A is "Plywood" (till 12 November) - so interesting - here plywood is being used for bodies of airplanes -

Walking round the museum, reluctant to head home, I took about a zillion* photos. Yes, I know - whatever will I do with them, and what good are they unless you DO something with them? I would contend that taking photos is, like drawing, a way of Looking Harder. Rather than going click, click, click, it's possible to look for the best composition, lighting that works, get the distance from the scene or object right, find the best angle, all those things.

*zillion = more than 20 but less than 40. Including labels.

In the Furniture gallery up on the 6th floor, this strangely awkward chair is by Eileen Cooper - it's a folding hammock chair, designed in 1938 -

 Adjacent to the National Art Library, a leather "chair" gets plenty of use -

I took the opportunity to renew my National Art Library card, and hope to spend time there regularly.

More plywood in the garden. Hours had passed, and the rain had stopped -

Saturday, waiting for boats from the Great River Race to appear, I wandered through the Classic Boat Festival and read about the history of the boats on show, including quite a few Dunkirk boats -

The race, 330 boats, started at Canary Wharf in a brisk wind and would end 21.6 miles later at Ham, by which time the rowers would also have had to battle the turning tide. Hard work - and high spirits, much encouragement from the spectators -

 Some of the rowers did it canoe-style -